I've been thinking about how to properly backup Sharepoint such that it could be restored. Right now we have a simple farm with only one web application, several site collections each of which may have some [sub] sites.

I know the platform itself needs to be backed up for disaster recovery but what about being able to respond if an end-user accidentally deletes a document from a library. How can the administrator setup a best-practice so that the above document can be restored to the library in a site collection in the smoothest manner.

I've done a fair bit of searching on this and this seems like an enormously large subject and some vendors suggest persuasively that only their product will provide this type of backup/restore functionality.

1 Answer
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One of the simplest techniques for this is to use ordinary SQL backups (for which your DBAs should be very familiar with).

Whenever you then need to restore an item, list or site (that's not in the recycle bin) is to use the SQL backup and either mount it to a dummy farm or web application or use unattached content db approach.

This does not require any third party apps and just basic SQL knowledge and SharePoint PowerShell.